1. Field of the Invention
The apparatus of the present invention relates to automatic door openers for manually operated doors. More particularly, the present invention relates to an automatic door opener that is adaptable to a manually operated door which allows for automatic opening of the door, yet when the door is opened manually, the manual opening of the door does not impact or effect any operation of the automatic opener for reducing wear and tear on the automatic opener.
2. General Background of the Invention
In the field of door openers, it is a required standard that doors which provide ingress and egress to public facilities have the ability to open automatically in order to allow passage through the doorway of people who are handicapped such as in wheelchairs, walkers or the like. Automatic door openers are quite common in companies such as Horton, Door-O-Matic, Beasom, and others, and have provided automatic door openers over an extended period of time. Normally, there is a mechanism which is engaged to the door frame and the door itself, so that when it is electronically activated, an arm of the like would move the door from the closed position to the open position and return it back to the closed position after passage through the doorway. Such a door may be operated either by an electric eye, or through a manual depression of a button or the like on a door frame.
For those door openers which are placed into automatic operation through the manual depression of a button or the like, in not all cases would the door have to be opener automatically, but if a person chose to, could move through the doorway manually as through any other doorway. This is currently found in the art. However, one of the drawbacks in such a feature is that as the door is pushed open and allowed to returned to the closed position by a manual door operator which would override the automatic system, in the current state of the art, the automatic system is still engaged to the door, and would operate as the door is opening and closing through the manual force of the person moving through the door. The problem with this is that because of the constant passage of people through the doorway, for example, through public doorways of office buildings or the like, the gear assembly which is normally part of the automatic door opener becomes worn over time, and the components of the automatic system, although not used that frequently by a handicapped person, or operated every time a person manually goes through the door and therefore, wear and tear is quite high on these types of systems.
Therefore, there is a need in the industry for a system which allows a door to have an automatic door operation component so that a person who is handicapped can move through the doorway easily. However, in the event a person moves the door to the open position manually, the door is allowed to open without engaging any of the components of the automatic door opener, and therefore saving on the wear and tear on the components in the automatic system which would be in use only when the power button is engaged.